A Solitary Waking
by Alexandra Lynch
Summary: Draco sits up late one night, thinking, not drinking. Rated for language and sexual implications.


Author's Note: As we all know, not mine, and I'm not making a cent. I just occasionally get conscripted by random characters to write things down.  
  
By the way, I meant the rating. Nasty stuff ahead, even in implication. I don't know if this is in the same universe as my other stuff...if it is, it's about ten years in the future. Draco didn't bother to tell me that.  
  
* * *  
There's a pile of mail over there on the desk. I think I'm going to ignore it. If I hear or read one more goddamned condolence I swear I'll hex this goddamn place to the ground. Still, I look. Potter? Merlin's goddamned balls, it is from Potter. A rather warped smile rises to lift one side of my mouth. Not that anyone's saying, but it's even odds that Potter was the one to strike the last blow. And he sends a letter of condolence. A fucking letter. How very....polite of him. I laugh, harshly, and slump into a chair.  
  
Parts of me sometimes wonder if it ever could have been different. And then the other part, the rational, sane part, slaps the first in the face and says, "Wake up and smell the coffee, asshole." I was different from the beginning. We never could have been friends.  
  
It wasn't just the pureblood versus mudblood thing...I'm my father's son, but not in his prejudices, and anyway the Weasleys are us without money and pride, and the Potters were purebloods too, except that James married a Mudblood...it's something bigger and different.  
  
It's not until I got older, able to use what I'd been taught to break down my mental walls and analyze things, that I was able to see what it was. I had an intimate acquaintance with pain, and they hadn't.  
  
Harry had, a little...I saw flashes of the knowing in his eyes, but I don't think his Muggle relatives ever did more than slap him a bit, lock him in a cupboard, and make him miss his supper. And at least he had the freedom to despise them. I didn't even get that.  
  
This used to be the point where I got out the firewhiskey and started drinking. I glance over at the bottle and glass on the table, temptingly within arm's reach and shake my head. I don't need to do that now...all I'll get from it is a hangover and a problem that's still there. I rub my hand over my jaw...I need to shave before I go out there...and keep thinking. Make myself keep thinking.  
  
I heard all the time growing up that I was the image of my father, blond, grey eyes, and tall for my weight, always....it helped that he married his cousin, of course. Tends to make sure of family resemblances.  
  
Family...fuck. I can't even begin to tell people what it's like growing up that way, you get everything you want by paying with your honesty and your love and your very fucking soul for it. She was crying today, calling me cold. You made me that way. Or you let my father do it, it's the same thing. Funny thing was, I worshipped him. He looked like a god to me, all that cold beauty, and it was there even when he was naked.  
  
Images, of corridors that are cold and monochromed in the darkness, cool skin on mine, cool voice that only breaks when he...  
  
My mind is shuddering like a horse that's refusing a jump. I know, intellectually, it's old news, that he always had that bent...may explain why I'm an only child, why Narcissa...I don't want to call her mother, really...why Narcissa spent...delusions, Malfoy!...spends, I should say, so much of her time in that slightly pink-tinted haze that denotes the buffering of cold reality with those potions that you really aren't supposed to be able to get without a prescription.  
  
Not that that was a problem for us. Money will buy anything, my father used to say.  
  
Except, you know, it won't.  
  
I used to spend hours trying to get clean.  
  
Afterwards.  
  
And why is this coming up now?  
  
Of all the issues...  
Damn, yes, all right, I hear you, it's time. I'll do what's proper. They laid out robes for me on the bed. And if I've got dark circles under my eyes....well, it is my father's funeral.  
  
Maybe they'll take it for grief. 


End file.
